Initial Thesis Abstract: Without Here and There – where never will come near and go away from anything all the steps of the world *

Only once home is left behind even destructed, can it be constructed. Reflection on home in exile as a condition of dislocation and displacement becomes a way to escape either nostalgia or amnesia without a physical journey back. The act of writing becomes a journey from site to site, each site constituting a collection of references.

The thesis is a reflection on home in exile as a condition of displacement and not dislocation: An attempt to escape either
nostalgia or amnesia without a physical journey back. The writing becomes a journey from site to site, each site
constituting a collection of references that are the devices, the means and not the end of the exploration. The escape lies in
the relations between each site where parallels of modern art/architecture with the condition of displacement arise.

I I N V I S I B L E

A construct built by de-­‐struction: a process of interruption in material continuity that in turn reveals that which is
invisible.

The earthquake builds home through its very loss; when I am standing in the ruins, home leaves behind the physical
bounds of the house, and stands stronger in their absence. Home is not a house.

In the absence of the house the landscape becomes prominent. Landscape, light, smells and sounds each in turn substitute
one another only to reveal that what constitutes home is not material.

De-­‐struction can create by other less dramatic means such as traversing space; within the space that home is left behind;
for home almost did not exist before it was left behind.

In the space of the aeroplane above the clouds, home appears. As if once you gain altitude, memory and place become,
and only can be retrieved there.

II W I T H O U T H E R E A N D T H E R E

‘It is suicide to be abroad but what is it to be at home? (…) A lingering dissolution’.

The essence of home takes an extreme form in relation and tension with exile, not that they are opposites and negate one
another and therefor can delineate the limits of each other, but because they both work towards an impossible impasse,
side by side – outside by outside.

In the formation of home through this mutual relation, the space and time of the border are essential. Where is this
border, this margin that expands and thickens in time and space?

Distance is no longer definite and cannot be measured but is relative to time and how one can relate to the place of either
outside. ‘When we relate ourselves to things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things
themselves. We do not represent distance merely in our mind. Thinking gets through, and persists through the distance to
that location.’

‘Everything near becomes far’. Goethe refers to the evening twilight. It is true at nightfall, the things closest move away
from my eyes and instead the furthest stars are in my grasp. Created by night, where the visible world has moved away
from my eyes, perhaps forever, there is space for the invisible.

Near and far are not tied to location or the removal from it but what is at stake is an idea of displacement, that goes
beyond being a mere state of being and can form a tool for the exiled not as something gone wrong but as a process with
its own form and possibility. ‘The only way he or she can cope with the heavy baggage of culture is to subject it to certain
kinds of displacement, which lightens its burdensome weight. (…) In this effort (…) the exiled is engaged in a work akin to
that of the modern artist whose energies have in the last century, been marshalled not so much to represent objects as to
displace them’.

The exiled, the inhabitants of the thick expanded border, can subvert their displaced state of being into a device that can
find home.